ESPN?s relationship with boxing was spotty, but it was dependably spotty. That dependable spottiness, alas, is ending this week?
?A sportswriter is entombed in a prolonged boyhood.??Jimmy Cannon
I understand ESPN, but I am not a fan. Aside from boxing, which matters as life and death matter, the only sport which interests me is sumo, which ESPN, despite the cornucopia of sports they broadcast ad infinitum, has been given unforgivably short shrift.
But its relationship with boxing, while spotty, was at least dependably spotty. That dependable spottiness, alas, is ending this week.
Following in the footsteps of former fistic mainstays like USA Tuesday Night Fights and the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, ESPN is abandoning the fight game, pulling down the shutters on ESPN2 Friday Night Fights, so that something more compelling, like beach volleyball or skateboarding, can be shown in its place.
Don?t get me wrong. I have nothing against beach volleyball. Who, after all, in their right mind doesn?t enjoy ogling abs on ball-jamming Amazons? But volleyball, like skateboarding, like the kaleidoscope of sports and would-be sports that pours from ESPN like two buck chuck into a wino?s gullet, is at best a poor imitation of the competitive drive that is the essence of boxing.
But essence is and has never been ESPN?s game. Its game is capital, the very thing denied to Friday Night Fights, the very thing that made it an also-ran among the well financed thoroughbreds, before driving it from the air altogether.
ESPN?s first boxing show aired in 1980 and was called ESPN Top Rank Boxing. In those days, Top Rank was playing second fiddle to Don King Productions, a fair indication of just how much things have changed. In 1998, as the cable tentacles reached ever further into the bog of irrelevance, the network unveiled ESPN2 Friday Night Fights. Initially, Teddy Atlas and Bob Papa were ringside, while Max Kellerman and Brian Kenny manned the studio. Some of those gents have gone onto bigger and better things, but the biggest and best of them, specifically Teddy Atlas, held down the fort, by hook and by crook, by telling the truth on a medium for the most part devoted to lies.
Where Atlas goes from here is anybody?s guess. It?s hard to keep a good man down, and Atlas, who can be as wild and crazy as he can be intelligent and compassionate, is as resourceful as they come. He?s not likely to appear on HBO or Showtime. Teddy?s too unpredictable, too unconventional, too outspoken, too much the wild man for those networks to tame. But he, unlike ESPN Friday Night Fights, will not go quietly into that good night.
We?ve not heard the last of Teddy Atlas.
